'Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;'

Because it's such a vivid, cartoon-ish, even faintly grotesque, image.

Then I liked

'This ecstasy doth unperplex,
We said, and tell us what we love;'

As a statement on love, but also as a statement on anything that makes you happy. It seems, at least temporarily, to 'unperplex', and simplify existence.

'When love with one another so
Interinanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.'

Again, the phrase 'Defects of loneliness' for me has a more general application than in connection with romantic love.

Interestingly Dr Johnson criticised Donne for that very grotesque element - when he coined the term Metaphysical Poetry it wasn't a compliment. He said "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises: but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased."

By the way - I love that 'unperplex' - I'm guessing he coined it and I'm also guessing no-one much else ever used it

a statement on anything that makes you happy. It seems, at least temporarily, to 'unperplex', and simplify existence.

that's worth mulling over, you could be on to something with that. as life advice it might just be up there with luka's thing about finding out how normal (or otherwise) you actually are and adjusting accordingly.

Coincidentally the Donne poem just made a brief appearance in a short book I'm reading at the moment.

"Donne's most acute meditation on these themes is comprised in "The Extasie", where soule and bodie of the two lovers go out in separateness to accomplish "a new concoction" (the alchemical imagery is pervasive), which "interanimates two soules" by intimate exchange of body and mind; initially "it was not sexe / We see" but by transplant giving life and power to love between them. One of Donne's most daring images presents the feat of shared ocular vision which

did thread
Our eyes, upon one double string,
so to'entergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the meanes to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation

This exotic grafting-usage is certainly beyond all horticulture; it's to suggest an intertwining of fingers so intimate as if to make them grow together, into a shared and fused body or what is later described as "That subtile knot, which makes us man". There can be no means to justify entergraft as a working or workable metaphor, it's part of an outreaching rhetoric of intimacy, witty and theoretic and ambitious, deliberately at a considered distance from explicit sexual innuendo. Shakespeare attempts a full seriousness about the meaning of this idea (this word); Donne is serious about it's effect, within his poem and it's provocation to the attentive reader"

from
'Graft and Corruption: Shakespeare's Sonnet 15'

interesting to read in light of the speculation that Donne was heir to a tradition of ritual sex magic passed down through the Muslims-Templars-Troubadours. (Ezra Pound - 'Spirit of Romance' etc etc)

"Donne, who may have influenced English romantic poetry almost as
much as Shakespeare, attended Oxford while Bruno was lecturing there
and seems to have picked up some of the Nolan's doctrines. The fact that
Donne's poems often have double and triple meanings, concealed jokes and
Hidden symbolism is a critical commonplace, but this has not usually been
* Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, n.d.) In The Spirit of Romance, with
roore clarity but equal caution, Pound grants that what was involved was a yoga utilizing
the opposite polarities of male and female." De Rougemont in love in the Western World
leaves no doubt that it was classic Tantric yoga, prolonging the sex act into a trance in
which the "souls" or "magnetisms" are, to some degree, visible.
related to the use of similar red herrings by the "Hermeticists" like Bruno
who always sought to conceal their sexual teachings from the Holy
Inquisition by such devices. In this connection, Donne's The Ecstasy is notable
as a poem that has almost always been misunderstood by scholarly
commentators. Here are the key stanzas, with emphasis added by me in the
form of italics:
Where, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best.
So t' intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures on our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.
As 'twixt two equal armies fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls, which to advance their state
Were gone out, hung 'twixt her and me.
And whilst our souls negotiate there
We like sepulchral statues lay;
Allday the same our postures were
And we said nothing all the day.
This is generally described as an exemplar of "Platonic love," but it is
almost certainly nothing of the kind. Readers unaware of the Tantric-Sufi
tradition in Tibet, India and the Near East and its transmission through the
Templar-troubadour cult and the various "alchemists" and Illluminati
assume that if Donne and his lady "sat" together they must have been
without sexual contact. Actually—see any Tibetan painting of the yabyum
position, as it is called—sitting in each other's laps in the double-lotus
position is basic to all sexual yoga. According to some writers there are
neurological reasons for this—it allegedly diverts the sexual energy or
bioelectricity from the central nervous system and sends it into the
autonomic (involuntary) system—but, from a Freudian point of view, it
restores the male to the purely passive role of the infant at the breast and thus
represents the oralization of the genital embrace. Not unexpectedly, the
purpose of this is to recapture Freud's "oceanic experience" or the "trance or
Unity" as mystics call it. In some traditions, influenced by Gnostic magic
ideas, the couple stares into each other's eyes; cf. Donne's "and pictures in
our eyes to get / Was all our propagation." This method is also a form of
birth control, since it allows the male to experience orgasm without ejaculation."

luka, is there any implications outta donne being a tantric sex magician (as per Sting) or is it just interesting?

I read a bit about Gnosticism the other day - a frank kermode review of a book about milton blake and marlowe being gnostics - and it struck me as really interesting and ingenious.

In fact, reading more about milton and blake and michelangelo, to take three examples, has given me much more respect for religion than I felt formerly and has made me feel increasingly turned off by dawkins et al

As much as I don't believe in god, adam, eve, etc., I think there's a lot of wisdom and imagination in religion that it is simply arrogant to dismiss as if those religious thinkers of yesteryear were cavemen and we've got mobile phones now so point and laugh - and what's more, it's hard to say what we've come up with to replace it, in terms of ministering to our need to believe in a higher purpose than live consume procreate die

this is offtopic i suppose unless i make up some baloney about poetry being a shortcut to transcendence or something

the religious/mystical/magical part of life is real. it's a whole continent. it's absurd to say you dont beleive in it. it's there. you can visit. and its existence undergirds, maybe not everything, but a hell of a lot. and particularly in poetry.

So the tenant comes back under his arch
of blood, affirming its pulse; the air dips
sharply and we are cold in
wide-angle blankness,
by a bridge on the motorway not yet
open to traffic. Steel rods
strike a pressure chorus in the hostel
for the revenant already a victim,
who sees a small grey woman descend
down the steps to the sea. The first
yolk is defective. The force for existence
composes a colony of black spots.
Just under the line of surf the black
cursor makes the split total, the
atropine shelf of vision.
Who else can
surmount this, the tenant's glass
is empty and remote. Yet he ignites
with order as an
orange-yellow chimney.
He does not
command the freehold.
Suddenly we are overcome, to concede
the whole force of his body to rise,
to granulate and make a sugar anvil;
we search the downland, to bring him
safely to that point of rest. Lights
stream past the cartoid bodies, as
the victim reclaims us and our dark patch.
We are driven through rain to blue and scarlet,
to the memory of grey shadow
on the fringe of salt.

This is a passion which throws over
the hostage to violent ocular convulsion.
And still we cannot do it,
aspiration
leaves us coughing with retinal noise.
We apply for rebate on the form provided,
injected with vanillic acid diethylamide
our displacement is fused
by parody
of the military hint.
There he goes
as the road thickens
twin lights merge
and spin with syrup,
yet the grey figure
is absolutely not a part of
the citric acid alert;
the continent splits
off, the sea fumes,
and what she does
makes the arch a template of blurred foresight.
The tenant conspires with that power & is quiet.

luka, is there any implications outta donne being a tantric sex magician (as per Sting) or is it just interesting?

I read a bit about Gnosticism the other day - a frank kermode review of a book about milton blake and marlowe being gnostics - and it struck me as really interesting and ingenious.

In fact, reading more about milton and blake and michelangelo, to take three examples, has given me much more respect for religion than I felt formerly and has made me feel increasingly turned off by dawkins et al

As much as I don't believe in god, adam, eve, etc., I think there's a lot of wisdom and imagination in religion that it is simply arrogant to dismiss as if those religious thinkers of yesteryear were cavemen and we've got mobile phones now so point and laugh - and what's more, it's hard to say what we've come up with to replace it, in terms of ministering to our need to believe in a higher purpose than live consume procreate die

this is offtopic i suppose unless i make up some baloney about poetry being a shortcut to transcendence or something

OTOH I can't imagine richard dawkins writing a decent poem

further sliding off-topic to your own off-topic, currently reading a v knotty text on surrealism and its various explorations. 1 outstanding chapter on Gnosticism, Blake & many other poets but its hard work (French scholar writing in translation), although the sheer variation of themes makes its scope outstanding & its exceptionally well researched. If you have the time, theres masses of info to be drawn out & the poetry references are succinctly interpreted: